INFRASTRUCTURES FOR SUSTAINABILITY OF THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF MENDOZA DRYLANDS OR HOW TO SEE MORE THAN SAND

PASTOR, GABRIELA C.

Rome

Conferencia; Conference on “Advanced Scientific Tools for Desertification Policy”; 2010

European Commission VI Framework Program Global Change and Ecosystems Logo-csic Coordinating CSIC Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Spain

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } ABSTRACT (Poster) Throughout history, deserts have been perceived in very different ways; including visions that agreed on pointing out the negative connotations of the landscape because of the environment’s sterile nature, or viewing deserts as a spectacular landscape and a space of freedom, also as an expression of the magnificence of the geoforms of a capricious nature, or as a landscape to be defied and transformed, among many other viewpoints. The construction of Mendoza landscape has been guided by this last perception, and the results are one of the most conspicuous values since they express the different strategies for adapting and modelling an environment which is in principle hostile for building the habitat. Given that Mendoza is a territory built on a dryland scenario, water –and everything related to it- imprints the most profound territorial landmarks defining its landscape. In effect, the main element allowing for the present configuration of Mendoza landscape has been and is the management and control of water. This control allowed, on the one hand, construction of the oases, but on the other hand, it turned deserts into residual spaces from the transformation process whereby their desert characteristics were further emphasized. The loss of production capacities brought very deep changes in the daily practices of the inhabitants of non-irrigated lands, forming a landscape that is subsidiary to those hegemonic landscapes consecrated in the imaginaries associated with Mendoza and its water culture, that is, with the oases. The constitution of a system of infrastructures for sustainability appears as an opportunity to integrate knowledge management, training and institutional roles in the integral modelling of the territory in a sustainable fashion. One of these infrastructures is the “Network of observatories of cultural landscapes of the Mendoza desert”. This is a powerful tool able to capitalize the synergies of sector actions from different areas of territory administration, particularly environment, culture and tourism, in the framework of a desertification policy. The network promotes sensitization and diffusion of territorial culture via strategies that articulate interactive landscape-observer experiences, with the aim to promote a more conscious and responsible approach to the values of landscape, as well as to the processes and trends occurring in the territory and which the landscape enables to observe.The study presents the scientific and technical grounds for putting this type of infrastructures into action through a set of seven bases that encompass from the conceptual settings for the desert landscape as a social construction, to those destined to define stakeholder use of the network. This is supplemented by a set of directions for their implementation and interpretation from four complementary viewpoints: geography of invisibility, the logics of adaptation to a growing desertification; the desert as an opportunity for sustainable development and traditional knowledge as the cultural heritage of desert communities.